Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Problem With Evolution
ChronWatch ^ | 09/25/05 | Edward L. Daley

Posted on 09/26/2005 5:44:09 AM PDT by DARCPRYNCE

Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection.

However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion, and even Darwin knew about the lack of evidence in the fossil record to support his theory a century and a half ago.

(Excerpt) Read more at chronwatch.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Philosophy; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: animoacids; anothercrevothread; bacterialflagellum; charles; charlesthaxton; code; complexity; creation; creationsim; crevolist; crevorepublic; darwin; darwinschmarwin; deankenyon; descent; design; dna; doublehelix; embryos; enoughalready; evolution; fable; genetics; genisis; god; homology; id; intelligent; irreducible; jonathanwells; judeochristian; keywordbonanza; legend; macroevolution; michaelbehe; michaeldenton; micromachines; modification; molecule; moralabsolutes; morphology; mutation; myth; natural; needanotherkeyword; origin; paulnelson; phillipjohnson; proteins; selection; selforganization; speciation; species; stephenmeyer; thumpgoesthebible; toomanykeywords; vertebrates; walterbradley; williamdembski; yomommaisanape
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 281-300301-320321-340341 next last
To: Right Wing Professor
That's why we have the Constitution, to protect us from the tyranny of the mob.

Why Professor, you astonish me. A group of people in a local jurisdiction propose to do something of which you disapprove, and you want to haul them into federal court (and call them a mob, to boot). I can see it now: the Professor awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare of pine-tar torches, pitchforks, and hemp ropes, and of being pursued by rubes who want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, and who will encourage them to marry their first cousins. That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’

What was the complaint, in the first place, that generated this particular variation on the thread? Someone was lamenting the fact that “people in classrooms hearing about intelligent design,” more than anything else, would be made into a political issue. Fate sealed the destiny on that circumstance way back whenever we put government in charge of education. If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.

301 posted on 09/27/2005 7:26:39 PM PDT by YHAOS
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 218 | View Replies]

To: YHAOS
I can see it now: the Professor awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare of pine-tar torches, pitchforks, and hemp ropes, and of being pursued by rubes who want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, and who will encourage them to marry their first cousins.

We had a little discussion a couple of weeks ago with a couple of Christian Reconstructionists, a group who want to throw out parts of the constitution, institute a theocracy, and introduce stoning for homosexuals, adulterers and disobedient children, exactly as laid out in the Bible. These adherents of CR happen also to be vocal creationists.

So, yeah, I do take them seriously. Three hundred years ago we were hanging witches in this country. I'm sorry, but a significant number of your co-religionists seem to have moved not a bit from the mind set that permitted those horrors.

The Discovery Institute have said, in writing, that the teaching of ID in schools is a wedge strategy to get the teaching of religion into schools. Why wouldn't I take them at their word? Why should I trust instead the reassurances of someone I suspect of dissimulating his real motives?

That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’

The Professor, since he knows a little history, remembers that fundamentalist Christians in this country were until recently Democrats who voted for statist economic policies. Now he has to endure being lectured by these johnny-come-latelys about what a conservative is.

If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.

With the massive assumption of federal control of education at the behest of the current President, a little judicial oversight of school districts scarcely seems worth worrying about. In any case, this battle was lost when the 14th amendment was passed. The US Bill of Rights is now binding on the states. You can't go back 150 years to the aftermath of the civil war, any more than you can go back 300 years to theocracy.

302 posted on 09/27/2005 7:54:23 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 301 | View Replies]

To: blowfish

that's what I was saying...the difficulty of painting such a masterpiece couldn't just happen without an artist doing it. A human body is so much more detailed and complex, it only makes sense that there had to be a designer behind it.


303 posted on 09/27/2005 10:18:22 PM PDT by fabian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 281 | View Replies]

To: Ichneumon

yes, living things are produced by "nature"...but what I was saying is that they are so much more detailed and complex than a mere painting. So a designer has to be behind it just as a designer is behind a masterpiece.


304 posted on 09/27/2005 10:23:14 PM PDT by fabian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 260 | View Replies]

To: fabian

Well, you and I completely disagree. The only evidence you can present is your own incomprehension, and that's not science, that's just incomprehension. Sorry.


305 posted on 09/27/2005 10:38:09 PM PDT by blowfish
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 303 | View Replies]

To: Mylo

"The Nationalist Socialists were Christian..."

"I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that has ever existed."—*Adolf Hitler

The Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine of Teutonic racial superiority.

Nazism was itself a "political religion," Cardiff University historian Michael Burleigh stresses in his magisterial "The Third Reich: A New History." It sought to displace the traditional church and command spiritual authority as well as temporal. Its special animus toward Jews was not religious but racial, and it "had one foot in the dark irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes were all or nothing--national and racial redemption or perdition."

The Nazi attack on Christianity was widely understood at the end of World War II. William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" recounts the Nazi plan for the Christian churches: It included an intention to "exterminate irrevocably . . . the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800." Current denominations would be replaced by the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of "Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."

"Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary thinking—probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas, quite undisguised, lie at the basis of all that is worst in Main Kampf and in his public speeches. A few quotations, taken at random, will show how Hitler reasoned . . [*Hitler said:] ‘He who would live must fight; he who does not wish to fight, in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.’ "—*Robert E.D. Clark, Darwin: Before and After (1948), p. 115.

"I cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the atheism it engendered, led to the moral climate that made a holocaust possible."—*Edward Simon, "Another Side to the Evolution Problem," Jewish Press, January 7, 1983, p. 248.


306 posted on 09/27/2005 11:32:36 PM PDT by razorbak
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 269 | View Replies]

To: blowfish; fabian
I think he comprehends very much. His analogies are very illustrative.

You misinterpret your judgments of another's comprehension as evidence, and thats not evidence or even sound scientific method, but it is the way (a large segment) of the cosmo-evo cult on these boards.

Wolf
307 posted on 09/28/2005 6:29:23 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 305 | View Replies]

To: razorbak
All the anti-Christian quotes of Hitler are from one source published after Hitlers death and they are suspect at best, and even if true were only secretly whispered to that one suspect source.

The many propaganda pieces that the Nazi's produced for public (German) consumption were VERY CHRISTIAN, and decried the Jews for the murder of Christ.

Hitlers many PUBLIC pronouncements were Christian and designed to inflame Christian sentiment against Jews.

Hitler described himself as a Catholic, he was an alter boy, and he was never excommunicated or renounced his faith.

Pagans have no reason to hate Jews. Christians think they do.
308 posted on 09/28/2005 6:41:16 AM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 306 | View Replies]

To: razorbak
Mein Kampf: ". . . I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work." He made essentially the same claim in a speech before the Reichstag in 1938.

In 1941 Hitler told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." In fact, Hitler was never excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and Mein Kampf was not placed on the Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

Hitler's biographer John Toland explains Catholicism's influence on the Holocaust. He says of Hitler: "Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. . .."

Hitler is said to have admired the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, more than any other German. Among Luther's many denunciations of the Jews, there are such religious sentiments as: "The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows seven times higher than ordinary thieves," and "We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them."

When Hitler was asked in 1933 what he planned to do about the Jews, he said he would do what Christians had been preaching for centuries. And the Nazis carried out their first large-scale pogrom of Jews in honor of Luther's birthday.
309 posted on 09/28/2005 6:50:17 AM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 306 | View Replies]

To: razorbak

Hitler on National Socialism and Christianity:

Hitler on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ."

In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!"

October 24, 1933, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

In a speech delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990), Hitler said:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.

Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.

When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.""


310 posted on 09/28/2005 7:00:29 AM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 306 | View Replies]

To: RunningWolf; fabian
Not at all. He states that what he sees around him is too complex to occur without a designer manually assembling the pieces. That observation (and I've no doubt that fabian is an observant person) does not constitute evidence of anything other that the limits of fabian's knowledge.
The one thing thats clear on these threads is that neither side of the argument can persuade the other side of anything,
311 posted on 09/28/2005 7:31:38 AM PDT by blowfish
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 307 | View Replies]

To: Mylo
Okay so great evil is done by men, madmen like Hitler.

Modern men harvest stem cells from aborted babies, scientists seem to say its good. I say its evil.
What say you?

Wolf

312 posted on 09/28/2005 7:32:47 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 310 | View Replies]

To: blowfish
See this is where words fail. Like the words used here of a designer in some corner of the universe manually assembling the pieces.

Wolf
313 posted on 09/28/2005 7:36:31 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 311 | View Replies]

To: RunningWolf

Science cannot differentiate between what is good or what is evil. Science isn't a morality system. It can only tell you what works and what doesn't.

Many Scientists are opposed to abortion. Many think that adult stem cells hold more promise. So there is no "Scientists seem to say it is good". That is a construction YOU made.


314 posted on 09/28/2005 7:39:28 AM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 312 | View Replies]

To: blowfish
See this is where words fail. Like the words used here of a designer in some corner of the universe manually assembling the pieces.

I don't think he really said that and I don't think you really thought he said that. I know I don't says those things but somehow it gets construed that way.

I wont accuse you of this, but it seems a convenient way of a few on 'your side' to dismiss their opponent.

Wolf

315 posted on 09/28/2005 7:40:55 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 311 | View Replies]

To: Mylo
Well then thats because I was trying to operate within the parameters of the evos here, many of them state it as 'science says' and no one on your side ever corrects it, then when I use it now its bad logic.

Wolf
316 posted on 09/28/2005 7:44:33 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 314 | View Replies]

To: RunningWolf
Whatever analogy you want to use, it boils down to the same thing. And the arguments boil down to the same thing: "we don't understand how everything works, so someone or something must have consciously intervened to make it happen."

I don't believe that for a second. Others do believe that. I can live with that.

317 posted on 09/28/2005 7:46:04 AM PDT by blowfish
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 315 | View Replies]

To: blowfish
someone or something

Thats not my analogy, is it your's?

To me thats another misinterpreting, or even a not grasping of a concept. Someone or something has to be somewhere, therefore cannot be beyond those things.

Wolf
318 posted on 09/28/2005 7:52:58 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 317 | View Replies]

To: DARCPRYNCE; All
To the evo gang. Who's idea of a joke is it to keep putting in these your mom is an ape keywords and such.

Is this more demonstration of the highly educated keen sophisticated minds you guys have,

WHAT GOOFBALLS!! LOL HA HA HA.

Wolf
319 posted on 09/28/2005 7:59:58 AM PDT by RunningWolf (U.S. Army Veteran.....75-78)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: RunningWolf
My problem isn't with your construction "Scientists say..." that is a generalization, but OK.

I'll use it. 'Scientists say that the earth orbits the sun.' Or 'Scientists say that non material explanations are not scientific."

My problem was with your "Scientists say it is good/evil." When someone delves into the realm of good and evil they are not doing so as "a Scientist" but as a human being with a morality system.

Science is not a morality system.

Moreover many Scientists are of differing opinions on almost any subject not directly related to science. Such as the nature of good and evil.

So as you don't think I'm avoiding the question (although it has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about, unless your going to say that only Scientists have abortions, and that this was over a dispute on Scientific interpretation (as the illogical postings of those who attribute the murders of Nazi's and Commie's to Scientific dispute are attempting)), here is my opinion.

I think (not as a Scientist mind you, but as a human) that creating human life for experimentation is evil. However I am glad that President George W. Bush was the first President to authorize embryonic stem cell research on cell lines that were already established. To let something of value go to waste is also evil; although of a less sinister nature.
320 posted on 09/28/2005 9:23:43 AM PDT by Mylo ( scientific discovery is also an occasion of worship.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 316 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 281-300301-320321-340341 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson